Last month a bunch of RCMP members and civilian workers watched video cameras of two female inmates having sex.
“we can confirm publicly that all four RCMP members have been suspended,” says Inspector Tim Sheids of the Kamloops RCMP.
The three civilian workers have also been suspended.
Here’s what bothers me about the suspensions. These people have all been suspended WITH PAY. In other words, all seven are now on permanent paid vacation while the RCMP tries to figure out what to do with them.
All seven are being rewarded for their atrocious behaviour. That’s incomprehensible to me, but apparently is standard procedure for the RCMP. It’s got to change. We should not be rewarding people with paid vacations for behaviour that should get them fired.
At a minimum they should be suspended WITHOUT pay. At least then there might be an inkling that they’ve done something wrong.
But that’s not the point of this column.
Because of the criminal investigation that is now going on into their actions, all of the criminal cases that are waiting to go to trial could now be under review.
There is a 2009 ruling from the Supreme Court of Canada, R. v. McNeil, that requires full disclosure of all investigations involving police officers. This means the Crown must hand over all records of the code-of-conduct violations and criminal investigations involving these four RCMP members.
That could cause a lot of problems for Crown counsel.
Crown counsel Lorne Fisher, of course, was doing his best lawyer double-speak trying to find a way out of the mess.
“The rules with regards to McNeil are quite difficult and, if they say you are under investigation, it depends what they mean by that,” Fisher said. “McNeil speaks about being charged and there are very specific rules involved as outlined by the court. It becomes an issue as to whether or not and at what stage one reports the issue as falling within McNeil.
“The fact that someone’s being investigated doesn’t necessarily mean that anything is going to come of it,” he said. “People — not just police officers — have accusations made against them all the time and the vast majority of those go nowhere.”
Naturally the names of the four RCMP and three civilians involved have not been released to the public.
We wouldn’t want them to be embarrassed by their atrocious behaviour, would we?
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